Dr. Dundes was born Sept. 8, 1934, in New York, where his father, a lawyer, brought home great jokes from his bridge buddies on the commuter train.
At Yale University, he received bachelor's and master's degrees in English. He found himself entranced by mythical and symbolic aspects of literature. In short, folklore. It was far from a respected or major field in academia. One of his advisers thought that there was one school "someplace in the Midwest" -- by which he meant Indiana University -- that offered folklore studies.
Alan Dundes' subjects included fairy tales and gross-out humor.
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While working on his doctorate, he once turned in a series of jokes for a required course.
"Before then, it had never occurred to me to analyze the jokes I collected," he told the New Yorker. "But Vladimir Propp's 'Morphology of the Folktale' had just come out in English" -- the book was a scholarly study of Russian fairy tales -- "and I thought, 'Hey, this is a great methodology for jokes.' So I was early to hop on the structuralist bandwagon."
He joined the Berkeley faculty soon after graduating from Indiana University in 1962.
He published more than 250 pieces in scholarly journals, traveled to conferences worldwide and was quoted extensively in the media. He spoke about bears (great on Wall Street, mean in some fairy tales), the importance of table manners, the significance of jokes about blondes, the survivalist movement and the need for father figures in politics.
"The underlying psychology of elections is about sports and war, where women were not welcome," he once said.
At Berkeley, he amassed a trove of world folklorica: jokes, riddles, proverbs and games whose origins and symbolism he had his students examine. He was beloved among students, and one from the 1960s anonymously sent a $1 million check to the university to establish a folklore professorship in his name. He received the school's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1994.
Survivors include his wife of 48 years, Carolyn Browne Dundes of Berkeley; three children, Alison Dundes Renteln of Altadena, Calif., Lauren Dundes Streiff of Owings Mills, Md., and David Dundes of Walnut Creek, Calif.; a sister; and six grandchildren.
